The Petrograd City Conference of the R.S.D.L.P. (Bolsheviks)

APRIL 14–22 (APRIL 27–MAY 5), 1917

Resolution

on the Attitude Towards

the Provisional Government

Considering:

(1)thatthe Provisional Government, by its class character, is
          the organ of landowner and bourgeois domination;

(2)thatthe Provisional Government and the classes it
          represents are bound with indissoluble economic and
          political ties to Russian and Anglo-French imperialism;

(3)thatthe Provisional Government is carrying out its
          proclaimed programme only partially, and only under pressure of the revolutionary proletariat and, to some extent,
          of the petty bourgeoisie;

(4)thatthe forces of bourgeois and landowner counter
          revolution, now being organised, have already, under cover
          of the Provisional Government and with the latter’s obvious
          connivance, launched an attack on revolutionary
          democracy;

(5)thatthe Provisional Government is avoiding fixing the date
          for the elections to the Constituent Assembly, preventing
          the arming of the people as a whole, opposing the transfer
          of all the land to the people, foisting upon it the
          landowners’ way of settling the agrarian question,
          obstructing the introduction of an eight-hour workday,
          condoning counter-revolutionary propaganda in the army (by
          Guchkov and Co.), rallying the high-ranking officers against
          the soldiers, etc.;

(6)thatthis government, at the same time, is relying at
          present on the confidence of, and, to a certain extent, on
          an actual agreement with, the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’and Soldiers’ Deputies, which now unites an obvious majority
          of workers and soldiers, i.e., peasants;

(7)thatevery step of the Provisional Government, in both its
          domestic and foreign policies, is bound to open the eyes,
          not only of the proletarians in town and country and
          semi-proletarians, but also of the broad sections of the
          petty bourgeoisie, to the real nature of this
          government,

theConference resolves that:

(1)inorder to ensure all the state power passing into the
          hands of the Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies or
          other bodies directly expressing the will of the people,
          prolonged work is necessary to develop proletarian class-
          consciousness and to unite the urban and rural proletarians
          against the vacillations of the petty bourgeoisie, for only
          work of this nature can guarantee real advance on the part
          of the whole revolutionary people;

(2)thiscalls for many-sided activity within the Soviets of
          Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, for work aimed at
          increasing the number of these Soviets, consolidating their
          power, and welding together our Party’s proletarian
          internationalist groups in the Soviets;

(3)wemust organise our Social-Democratic forces more
          effectively, so as to be able to direct the new wave of the
          revolutionary movement under the banner of revolutionary
          Social-Democracy.